After a few days, and a few more installs, I think I've got to a development environment I'm quite happy with.

It's essentially the same as the Windows environment with the addition of Nginx and Supervisor.

-   VSCode for editing files
-   Nginx to serve the application
-   Supervisor to monitor php tasks
-   MySQL and Redis running as background services
-   Node running webpack or gulp
-   Firefox to view the website

Nginx

I chose Nginx as the web server in my stack as it's just as easy to configure it to serve PHP as it is to upstream a connection to a Node backend.

This has eased development by allowing me to have one less terminal open when working on a project.

I can also quickly switch between the front end of any of the projects I'm building as they'll all have a dedicated config file.

Supervisor

Supervisor is a process control manager that monitors the status of it's running task and will automatically restart a task/process on error.

By using Supervisor to control these tasks, I've removed the need to have another couple of terminal panes open and also stopped myself from needing to start workers the project may rely on.

Current state of happiness

Very happy. So far I haven't needed to boot back on to the Windows machine and I'm very much enjoying developing on Ubuntu.